SUMMARY - Blurry Screen Shots in Word 97

["Thompson, Sarah" <SThompso -at- RESDATA -dot- COM>]

Hello, all!

Following is my summary of the responses I received to my request for
help with blurry screen shots in Word 97.  I posted this before, but
haven't seen it come up - forgive me if it's a duplicate!

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Word 97 automatically anti-aliases displayed bitmaps, so [images] seem a
bit blurry onscreen, but print (or convert to PDF) just fine.  [more
than one reply was to this effect.]  [Follow-up to this was to check my
compression settings in PDF - I did, turned off the button that referred
to "image downsampling," and viola! <g> st]
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The time spent editing points to something many people don't think
about: screen shots of dialog boxes generally don't need more than 16 or
32 colours.  However, since they're grabbed on 256-color screens (at
minimum), they take up more space and memory than necessary.  What I
used to do was pop the image into Paint Shop Pro, knock the color depth
down to 4-bit (16 colors), and apply a palette I designed to optimize
the colors for perfect reproduction in print, Windows Help, and PDF.  It
only took a few seconds, but it saved a lot of time and disk space.
[another reply suggested finding out the color palette that the
developers were using and creating a custom Paint Shop Pro palette. st]
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What I do is use the built-in screenshot thing in Windows, paste and
crop in Paint.  Then I paste - special them as picture or bitmap, NOT
float over text.  Scales and prints well.  It may waste space, since
they are
stored in color but printed in greyscale.
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I use SnagIt for screen grabbing because of its good pre-cropping
features, and PaintShop Pro for further cropping, if needed. About
blurring, see my "Tip of the month" for June '98 about resizing of
bitmaps on http://www.prc.dk/user-friendly-manuals/ufm/tip-9806.htm.
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Work in the TIF format... TIF saves all the image information and, as
far as I'm concerned, does the best job when you have to change size or
color depth.
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If you are capturing large areas then cropping out a smaller section,
try setting some of the options on your capture softwear to permit you
to capture "areas".  Then, capture only what you need for a specific
graphic.
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Paint Shop Pro is a great tool - much more powerful than Paint.  I've
had occasion to practically recreate screen shots to meet my particular
needs by copying, pasting, and "filling in the the pixels"!
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I was having the same problem but fixed it quite easily by ensuring that
I used the Paste Special command not just Paste.  Within the Paste
Special command, you can choose what type of format to paste the screen
shot as.
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Thanks again to everybody who replied!
Sarah

Sarah Thompson
Resource Data International
"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a
sense of humor to console him for what he is."  - Francis Bacon


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